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Monday, November 24, 2008

Turkey Shirts for Monkey Girls

It's a joyful thing to be inspired over one's morning coffee...

Inspired over my morning coffee this morning by this post from One More Moore about making her children reverse applique handprint turkey shirts, this became our morning project after breakfast (one half leftover veggie burger, handful of leftover fries, and half a pear each) and books (two from each girl is my at-a-time limit--in current heavy rotation are Nutcracker stories and the Henry and Mudge books):Will's shirt, which once had a permanent marker stain where now there is a turkey, has a reverse applique with red plaid felt from my old undergrad dorm sheets, a button from my button jar, a beak and wattle from a felted wool sweater, and embroidery using the darning foot on my sewing machine.

Syd's shirt, which I think came out even better, once had a Baby Gap logo where now there is a turkey. It has the green plaid set of my old dorm sheets, and I think the embroidered beak and wattle look better than the felt ones on this shirt. I made both basically by following the blog post's instructions, except that I cheated by tracing the girls' hands onto freezer paper and then ironing it onto the shirt before stitching.

While I worked, I traced many more hands for the girls to cut out and color and just generally do stuff with. Other handprint little monkey activities include:

Cutting out handprints and using them to measure stuff (Will claims that she is five hands high--accuracy is clearly not important for this)

Comparing handprints of family members to talk about growing and aging, and making a collaborative family artwork with them

Making inkpad handprints to see the wrinkles on our skin

Pressing handprints into air-dry clay--I have one of these from when Will was a baby, and it's one of my greatest treasures

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The little pumpkinbears and I are currently accepting items for review. Handmade-related stuff gets reviewed at Crafting a Green World, while homeschool-related stuff gets reviewed right here at Craft Knife. Email me at jufinn at indiana dot edu for more info.

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